An easy to build, small sized Hot End for 3d-printers.

To those who have emailed me about the lack of files.. I'm updating the files please be patient no one is paying me to do this so progress is slow. My printer is also under repair and it will take some time to test my mods. The reason for the mods are to corrects some problems and to back out changes made for the museum challenge as the entry was unsuccessful.

My redesign (derivative) upgrade of a classic toy from my childhood, the original one still can be purchased in shops but they do NOT fly horizontally. This one does, in fact it can even fly over houses and get lost! Lucky we can print another! It improves our world because when you pull the cord and it flies off horizontally the gyroscopic effect tracks it straight and level and gives you a big grin. Smiling people are happy and happy people make the world a better place. It takes advantage of the accuracy with which a 3D printer creates parts to produce a very precise aerodynamic and balanced flying toy that only works well due to the precision of a 3D printer. I'm designing different Prop Rockets for it say tuned :-) bigger faster further!

Updated to identify the aspects for the new museum challenge

sorry for the german part names
klein = small
gross = large

usable with the wade extruder.

large gear:
teeth: 39
hole and hexagon made for M8 hexagon head bolt

small gear
teeth: 11
hole: 5mm (for NEMA17 engine)
axial hole 2.5mm for M3 thread. (Don't know if this works well. Haven't test it yet)

axial distance: 40mm
Still work in progress :3

Software used:
Inventor 2012 Professional
(Skeinforge44, Sprinter Firmware and Pronterface Host)

Attached are some photos showing the results of a simple experiment with printed ABS surface finishes, specifically "washing" with acetone (nail polish remover).

The first picture, "ABS Unwashed.jpg", is the print (Yoda Lite) with no treatment done to it. As expected, the finish shows the layers clearly and has a slightly rough finish to it.

The second, "ABS Acetone.jpg", shows the finish after a quick (~10 second) bath in acetone. The part was immersed in a metal dish with the acetone and removed, allowed to air dry. The finish is much smoother and hides the layers partially. Interestingly, it has a distinctive "wet" look to it. (For some time, I thought the acetone wasn't drying, but in fact, it just looks wet.) It also feels really nice and clean.

In the third picture, "ABS Acetone water.jpg", I rinsed the acetone off with water immediately after the bath. This left a distinctive white discoloration and "taring" of the finish. It looks like paper towel shreds were left on it.

In the fourth, "ABS Gradient.jpg", I tried to create a "gradient" of time in which the surface was immersed. The right-most side was about 10 seconds, and the left-most had none. This is the bottom of the model which has the grid lines from the raft. You can see the transition from virtually no grid-marks (right) to fully marked (left). Since the model is hollow, after the bath, the bottom surface is noticeably weaker; with a little pressure you can depress the surface. This is not the case with the unwashed model, so even this small amount of dissolving has changed the mechanical strength of the model.

I have concluded that in some cases, it is certainly worthwhile to give the printed model a quick acetone bath. This gives a more polished look. I would also consider using acetone if some parts were a tight "fit" and I needed to dissolve a very small amount of material (much cleaner than a knife, file, or even sanding). Finally, let the parts air dry; do not use water to rinse them.

I'd love to hear other people's comments on surface finishing!

Well its time again for a Portal Cube.

I found this some time ago as a post. I went searching recently and found it also as an Instructable. But, it is not easily accessible here via Thingiverse. I'd ask for the others to post the cube here but, I guess their stuff is too old to be monitored. So --- from: instructables.com/community/Rapidprototyped-Weighted-delCompaniondel-Stor/ --- Here is a Companion/Storage Cube.

Note: This is a BOX! I printed one very small Cube on my Thing-O-Matic (yellow) and a full 2" one on a V-Flash. Both are good to have!

This is a heated bed for a repstrap that is intended to be an alternative to a proffessionaly fabbed board.

I made this board because it is often hard to get large sheets of copper clad, and if it is, they are often more than one repstrapper may be willing to pay, especialy on a first machine.

Currently, the design below gets between 70C and 90C (under glass) when pulling ~5.79A @12v when etched onto 2oz/in copper clad.

Flow rate and feed rate are no longer difficult to calibrate, thanks to stepper extruders. However, to really get your print quality to the next level, you will need to calibrate temperature and reversal settings for a given material. (and/or travel feed rate, depending on your machine) This is a fully parametric calibration test for both bridging and gap distances within the same part.

Bridging is a great test for temperature. If the bridge is too saggy, the temperature is too high. There are also some advantages to higher temperatures though, one of which is it makes the thermoplastic less viscous, creating less work for the motor. If your preference is printing really hot, a fan concentrating cool air on the extrudate can also be used to calibrate bridging.

Traversing large gaps is obviously a great test for reversal/travel speed settings. Set extra shells to 0 to avoid hiding any ooze behind inner perimeters. Make the infill very low to save printing time since you only care about spanning gaps for this test. Use a camera for feedback if you are extra picky about strings.

Good Luck.

This is the second half of my openscad.org gear sets.

I couldn't get the top and bottom parts of the double helical to union properly, so I ended up offsetting the bottom piece by 0.1mm :( It skeins and prints fine though.

This thing is part of a set:
- spur gears: thingiverse.com/thing:1336

UPDATE: I'm printing some gears and noticed a couple mistakes on the openSCAD script: the variable 'orientation' wasn't doing anything and the value 'extrudeInDiam' was in fact being used as radius. They're both fixed now and I uploaded a new version of the script.

I was showing off some of my designs at a recent Makerbot user group meeting, and I wished I had tags for them with QR codes and some other relevant data. This bookmarklet will generate such tags.

Note: I initially set the license to CC-BY for the example picture because the CC licenses look a little nicer on the tags, but I've changed the license to PD, so feel free to use it however you want.

Update: Some errors were reported with the DOM walking, so I rewrote those portions to use Regex instead. This should improve compatibility.

This is a calibration thing, that i design to test my printer.
It has several features:
- thin walls in x and y direction 4mm 2mm 1mm 0.5mm 0.25mm
- Holes in different sizes r= 4mm 2mm 1mm 0.5mm
- Overhang test with differnt slopes
- Bridge test with different lengths
the whole block is 50x50x10mm
I did not test it with skeinforge but on repsnapper it works fine.

this is my arduino mega board version 1.8 i still have a few more things that i wish to ad onto it, like a pwm driver for the heater elements on the reprap. and i need to add another 100k thermistor input,

Even though there are lots of great gears on thingiverse, I couldn't resist the urge to model some too :)

The combinations of parameters are too many to upload an STL for each, so I just picked a few.

I also made a version for helical gears: thingiverse.com/thing:1339

This is a derivative of the MakerBot Temperature Sensor board.

I rerouted it so that all of the primary wiring is on the back side to make home-etching and soldering easier. Since a home-etched board doesn't have plated thru-holes, wires that connect via a thru-hole would have to be soldered on both sides, which is more difficult that it sounds.

There is one via, and I changed the LED and current-limiting resistor to SMT.

I added a capacitor for power conditioning.

The outline it modified to support mounting along the end of the EC, sharing the two top screws.

Note that in the photos, I hadn't added the outline or the capacitor yet.

After my initial not so successful attempts to create a snapping sphere I had a chance discovery when I tried to put a ball inside the two sphere halves and noticed that although the two parts of the sphere don't hold onto each other they both snap to the slightly smaller ball in the middle...So I went back to the original symmetric Demi-Sphere thingiverse.com/thing:3068 for the shell but added an inner sphere (without the hard to print top and bottom tips) to hold the two demi-sphere parts together. Snaps like a charm.

The reprap is not the only 3d printer that can replicate itself, now the Makerbot can to.

This Makerbot is made out of aproximatly 150 individual pieces that is printed on , "yes you guessed it) a Makerbot.

My Makerbot worked hard everyday for about a month straight to finish this project, and i am immensly happy about the end resoult.
There are more pictures on the bottom of this page;)

(The pictures doesnt do it justice one bit, but it really is a thing of beauty)

Now i have added a zip file that includes all stl- and max-files.

This board allows you to control one stepper motor, as well as receive input from two limit switches. It is based around the Allegro A3982 Stepper Motor Driver with Translator. The A3982 is capable of driving up to 2A per coil. This board was designed to improve upon and replace the v1.x series of stepper drivers which are based upon the venerable L297/L298 stepper drivers. The A3982 offers a number of improvements:

* Only one chip to solder, as opposed to the two chip L297/L298 combo
* Superior DMOS technology (no heatsink required!)
* Built-in diodes and synchronous rectification (no large diode array!)
* Much cheaper and smaller than the L297/L298 (about $10 cheaper, total!)

The downside is that the board is mostly SMT, although we made a conscious design decision to stick with some of the largest and easiest to solder SMT components on the market. We used 1206 sized resistors and the A3982 itself is in a SOIC package. The board is very easy to put together, even for a beginner. Using a technique such as solder paste + hot plate, the board becomes ridiculously easy to solder. I found that it is much easier to solder SMT boards in this fashion than to solder pin after pin manually with through-hole components.

This is my second prototype of a Sarrus linkage type linear axis. A Sarrus linkage uses hinged joints to make linear motion. The idea is to have a linear bearing suitable for making part of an x-y cartesian assembly without needing long polished metal rods, thus getting a 3D printer that can make more of its own parts.

Notice that there is a set of 4 holes on the top armature that match 4 hole patterns on the end pieces. This means that one axis could mount on two others at right angles.

Drive system: DC motor from a cheap garage sale inkjet printer, using the timing belt from the printer. The pulley at the other end of the belt is a screw/washer/spacer combination with a skate bearing. The skate bearing is mounted in a flexure plate style mount to give tension the belt.

Optical feedback: I took a optical quadrature encoder and encoder strip from the same printer as the motor. The encoder is mounted on the moving armature, and the strip is anchored at both ends in the end blocks.

Hinges: The hinges on the Sarrus linkage are made with 1/16" diam brass rod as the hinge pins. The holes for the hinge pins were reamed out with a 1/16" drill bit.

Frank Davies

This is a set of plastic snap-together blocks that was designed for a prototype universal constructor. You can see a simulation of a robot made from the blocks here youtube.com/watch?v=LumLzSQE5Vw

You can get more info on the strengths and weaknesses of the actual physical plastic blocks here molecularassembler.com/KSRM/3.18.htm

I published this on the RepRap buliders blob builders.reprap.org/ some days before and was asked to publish it here also.. so here is my post from the Builders blog...

nspired by a paper from Kruth et al. (2005, Benchmarking of different SLS/SLM processes as rapid manufacturing techniques) I also designed a benchmark model for the RepRap. It looks quite random but by printing it you can check whether your RepRap prints geometrically correct. I included the following features:

-vertical holes for M3, M4, M8 screws
-vertical hexagons suitable for M3, M4 M8 nuts
-horizontal teardrops M3, M4 M8 and hexagons for suitable nuts
-sharp edges with angles of 15, 30 and 45 deg
-thin walls 0.5mm, 1,0mm, 1.5mm and 2mm horizontally and vertically
-stair effect at sloped walls with angles of 15, 30, 45, 60 and 80 deg
-round corners, radius 4mm to 16mm
-gear teeth with 2mm wide teeth
-in addition to this, you can also check perpendicularity and parallelism of your printed objects, which were the general intentions of designing a benchmark.

You can download both the STL and the AoI file from SourceForge

/mendel/mechanics/test-parts



Printing it took about two hours, so why not watching a fancy movie while your RepRap prints its benchmark.

The very first version included a complete horizontal hexagon for M8 nuts, but apparently this made the object to big in height, so I just cut it off, leaving just a small offset ;)


The gear teeth were not built as expected but as a round corner with a bubbled rim. I am also missing the 0.5mm thin walls. The 1.5mm walls consist of only two parallel strings and are not solid, there is a small gap between them in both directions.

This is a design of the RepRap extruder drive that is compatible with the Darwin quickfit clamp system and the Ponoko lasercut kit. It will take either 16mm PTFE or heatsink based heaters. It is designed to be made with no lathing or machine tooling. An opto sensor may or may not be fitted to regulate rotation speed - I found that this was definitely required with an all-metal heater assembly. If you develop software to do that, we'd love to see it!

I usually watch my iPod at night while I’m sitting in bed - the problem is having to hold the iPod out in front of my face. I thought that it would be nice to have some helping hands, so I designed some.

This is my design for a landscape iPod nano "hand" holder - hence the cheesy "i" prefix to the name.

I don't know why I didn't make this design available a long time ago, but I just remembered I was hanging onto it when I could have been sharing it.


The design is free of charge. You can use it on the proviso that you share a small part of your personal expertise in the education of others. You can do this in any way that you wish and your contribution need only be small. If you’re a busy person then you can always contribute to a charity like The Fred Hollows Foundation hollows.org

As i promised, here is the now new and improved pinch wheel extruder a.k.a Plastruder.

This is a shopping cart deposit chip (23.23mm in diameter, 2.28mm high - exactly as big as a €1 coin) with an inscribed Metalab logo. I'll upload a 1cmx1mm high version of this soon, so that it can more easily be scaled to the coin size you need.

This is parametrized Box model. It can be adaped to your wishes by changing the parameters like height, diameter, screwing angle, grip height, and curve parameters. In case you just want a screwable jewellery box I included 3 versions of the box as stl files.

Stormtrooper head.
Imported from Max->3ds->FBX Converter->FBX->Maya->STL->Art of Illusion->STL.

This was printed on a MakerBot with Skeinforge parameters tuned to 0.25 mm/layer.

Fixed up a non-printing version which had a lot of double verts.

However, in the spirit of teaching fishing, I've prepared a quicktip on this subject:
blog.thingiverse.com/2009/05/13/bonus-blender-quicktip-vertex-doubles/

Felt like doing something a bit more complicated than a cup, so I went for a teapot.

All shaped in TopMod, subdivided/smoothed in Blender.

I'll be working on variants of this for a while... improving the spout, adding a mesh to hold the tea leaves back, and internal supports so it can be printed as is.